2005

Today I got a response from Councilwoman Maio: Dear Cyrus, I felt as you did until I heard the program. Since you haven’t, as you said, maybe it would be helpful to you to track down the Tuesday “Our Healh and Fitness” program and get a sense of what was presented. You might even be able to get a transcript. Linda After spending some time online, I responded with the following: Dear Linda, I’ve found and listened to the program…

Dear Councilwoman Maio, My name is Cyrus Farivar and I am a technology journalist who learned my trade while a student at UC Berkeley. I wrote for The Daily Californian and watched the City Council take stands against various issues. Sometimes those decisions are made with conviction and well-thought out reasoning, and sometimes those decisions are made with half-baked ideas that come from somewhere else. When I found out that the Berkeley City Council was considering building a citywide WiFi…

Over the weekend, I did an interview with Cyrus Irani (who is of Parsi/Indian origin, not Iranian, despite his name) of Strix Systems. They’re building WiFi in Macedonia. It “aired” today on The World’s Technology Podcast: Download it here. I’ll have a piece on The World (broadcast locally here on KQED every weekday at 2 pm) coming up in the next couple weeks. Thanks to Clark Boyd for making this possible.

Macworld: Whether you’re a hardcore gamer or just someone with few reliable games you play to blow off steam, this is the week for you at Macworld.com. We’re concentrating on Mac games, as we induct 10 new titles into Macworld’s Game Hall of Fame, located in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. (Why Pittsfield? Because way back when, the original author of the Hall of Fame feature, Steven Levy, decided the fictional Hall of Fame should be located in his hometown, where it’s remained…

I just finished this book two days ago. I bought it right before I went to Istanbul, breaking my own book-buying moratorium. (I have 10+ books that I’ve bought or have been given to me that I haven’t read yet.) It was very interesting, and in a lot of ways was an impressionist painting of the city of Istanbul. My main problem with it? It doesn’t have much of a narrative or momentum. It’s a series of varying length mini-essays…

Slate: By Cyrus Farivar Posted Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2005, at 3:31 PM ET At the World Summit on the Information Society two weeks ago, MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte unveiled the laptop he believes will digitize the developing world. The cute green computer sports a WiFi card, a 500 MHz processor, a 1 gigabyte flash drive, and a novel power source—a 6-inch hand crank that juts out from the side. It will run free, open-source software, most likely some derivation of Linux.…

Today I woke up uncertain, and you know that gives me the fits, so I left this land of fungible convictions, because it seemed like the pits And when I say, “conviction”, I mean it’s something to abjure and when I say “uncertain”, I mean to doubt I’ll not turn out a caricature. So I set off in search of my forbears, ‘coz my forebearance was in need. — Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, “Ballad of the Sin Eater” So…

You have Thanksgiving dinner with rice and “khoresht.” (STEW) Yep, at our Thanksgiving dinner with a bunch of my LA-based Persian extended family, we had baghali polo and grilled fish alongside our turkey, potatoes and stuffing.

BBC: “We will always be Muslims, Serbs or Croats,” said Veselin Gatalo of the youth group Urban Movement Mostar. “But one thing we all have in common is Bruce Lee.”

Wanderlustgeek.com ! First episode includes a chat about spending Thanksgiving abroad with Bhu and Lane.